Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Timothée Chalamet’s crime, David Ellison’s Skydance, and a red card.
Let’s go!
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Timothée Chalamet may star in a heist film.
Chalamet, along with director James Mangold (A Complete Unknown), are attached to High Side, a motorcycle heist film that is currently being pitched to various studios.
The synopsis shares DNA with some recent films:
F1-esque central character: “a former MotoGP racer [Chalamet] is haunted by a career-ending crash.”
A Place Beyond the Pines-esque inciting incident: The racer is asked to “use his talents for something bigger: robbing banks.”
Hell or High Water 2nd act: “Knocking over small-town desert banks with speed and precision.”
So on first blush, it’s derivative, but the team is exciting. Which means on an executional level, it’ll be top-notch.
Mangold and Chalamet are genre-flexible, and that makes them superstars. With Mangold able to direct everything from music biopics and superhero films like Logan to something more relevant for this project: racing dramas (Ford v. Ferrari) and westerns (3:10 to Yuma).
In a best-case scenario world, this has the grit of Mangold’s Logan and shows a side of Chalamet that is raw and untethered (like what was achieved in his portrayal of Dylan).
If it all coalesces, the team is top-notch, including Prod Co: Chernin Entertainment (Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari) and Sugar23 (who’s pitching), based on the short story by Jaime Oliveira.
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Skydance’s leadership solidifies.
Lego & Universal team on Inner Child from James Morosini.
ABC is developing Killer Class a high school crime drama.
Amazon fires 110 at Wondery, consolidates under Audible.
Prime’s Heads of State hits 75M views in one month.
Djimon Hounsou & Halle Berry lead Red Card thriller.
Alison Brie will direct a horror film.
Oscar-winner Ben Proudfoot (The Last Repair Shop) directs feature doc The Eyes of Ghana.
Bunny Yeager doc Naked Ambition dated Sept 12.
Amazon MGM’s Play Dirty & Republic’s Trust release first look images.
King & Conqueror (BBC) streams Aug 24 on Prime & HBO Max int’l.
Lee Chang-dong returns with Netflix’s Possible Love.
Prime’s Embassy series gets $13M in German production support.
Chatha Pacha, a Malayalam wrestling drama, sells to 100+ territories.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Skydance’s leadership is starting to coagulate. 13 executives are locked in. 4 in Paramount leadership have been let go: https://theindustry.co/p/skydances-leadership
Lego to me is a little like Ice-nine. Anything the company touches gets permanently turned into Lego (e.g., Pharrell’s Lego biopic Piece by Piece, The Lego Movie). So it’s interesting to hear that The Lego Group and Universal are lego-fying a script from James Morosini (Star: Netflix’s It’s What’s Inside, Dir/Wri/Star: I Love My Dad) called Inner Child. No details are known, but originally it was going to be edgier, and now it’s a LEGO movie.
Amazon fires 110 at Wondery, the podcast content studio it purchased in 2020 for $300M. The CEO (Jen Sargent) will leave, and the rest of the remaining Wondery team will consolidate under Amazon’s Audible division, which will allow it to pivot to a video-first strategy, which has been gaining market share because of YouTube. Wondery’s top projects that got adapted into series include Peacock’s Doctor Death, Apple TV+’s We Crashed, and recently FX’s Dying for Sex.
Mini Tidbit:
ABC is developing Killer Class, a crime drama about high school students solving cold cases, inspired by true stories. The series adapts Keith Sharon’s article on a Tennessee teacher’s groundbreaking after-school forensics club.
Tiny Hot Dogs: A Memoir is getting adapted for the small screen based on Mary Giuliani’s hilarious NY-set story. EP Michael Smith (dir. (17 eps of Suits) is set to direct the comedy series, which will follow an aspiring actress turned “accidental caterer.”
India’s Applause Entertainment (Virkar) has signed a new deal to adapt six of former politician Jeffrey Archer’s novels (The Clifton Chronicles) for film and TV. The Christmas Ring hits shelves Oct. 21st with the film set for a theatrical release on Nov. 6th.
Prime’s Heads of State (cast: Elba, Cena, Chopra) has hit 75M views since it launched 1 month ago. That puts it #4 for the most-watched Prime film in the same time window.
Jennifer Aniston’s new Apple TV+ show, I’m Glad My Mom Died, has had the director, Jason Reitman (Saturday Night) depart after creative differences with the showrunner.
Trailers:
A24’s Highest 2 Lowest
Dir: Spike Lee,
Cast: Denzel Washington, ASAP Rocky, Jeffrey Wright
Release: Aug 15
Neon’s Shelby Oaks
(remember Neon added in $1M for reshoots)
Release: Oct 3
20th Century Studios’ Ella McCay
Dir: James L. Brooks (As Good as It Gets, Broadcast News) - first film since 2010
Cast: Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Rebecca Hall, Woody Harrelson
Release: Dec 12
Crunchyroll’s The Invisible Man and His Soon-to-Be Wife
Release: 2026
Release date:
Lionsgate’s Greenland 2
Star: Gerard Butler
Release: Jan 9, 2026
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond) and Halle Berry will star in Red Card, an Africa-set thriller about human trafficking, directed by Joel Souza (Rust).
Hounsou will play a ranger whose son vanishes into North Africa’s criminal underworld, prompting a nation-wide cat and mouse chase with FBI Supervisor Amada Bruckner (Berry) spanning from Kenya to Casablanca.
Berry has over-indexed on action slanting roles ever since she played a Bond Girl in Die Another Day (e.g., Netflix’s The Union, John Wick 3, X-Men). She’s always stellar in these parts despite not having much to work with. We’d love to see another Monster’s Ball-esque performance from her.
Filming begins late 2025.
Mini Tidbits:
Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù (Slow Horses Season 3) will lead Netflix’s All the Sinners Bleed, portraying the first black sheriff in a small Virginia town, as he tries to unravel a mystery involving a serial killer. Obama's higher ground is producing.
One of Apple TV+’s longest-running shows, Trying, adds three new recurring actors to its season five cast.
Celia Imrie (The Thursday Murder Club)
Gbemisola Ikumelo (Peacock’s The Paper)
Colin Morgan (Belfast)
The BBC Studios dramedy does not yet have a drop date for its fifth season.
Country-pop artist Jessie James Decker is spreading some holiday joy in her acting debut in Karen Kingsbury’s The Christmas Ring. Currently shooting, hits shelves Oct. 21st. Theatrical release: Nov. 6th.
Billie Lourd (The Last Showgirl) will be joining Andrew Garfield in Amazon MGM’s Artificial directed by Luca Guadagnino (Challengers). This film follows OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during the tumultuous days when he is fired and then rehired.
Director Peter Collins Campbell’s (Dimland) new dark comedy Grind sees Jack Haven (I Saw the TV Glow) as a Manhattan delivery biker determined to make his rent in just one night. Comedian Janeane Garofalo (Wet Hot American Summer) has also joined the cast, with filming on the indie beginning this fall.
Moonlight actress Naomie Harris has been tapped to narrate miniseries Swim Sistas, a multi-part documentary celebrating Black women and their storied history with the sport of swimming. The BAFTA-nominated Candid Broads Productions (Enslaved) is producing.
Mena Suvari from American Beauty co-stars with Crispin Glover (Back to the Future) in Death of a Brewer, an 1800s-set film about a warring brewery. Suvari has been cast a lot in indies recently, including Cannes Market’s Closure, starring Michael Kelly and Kevin Pollak.
First Looks:
Amazon MGM’s Play Dirty
Dir: Shane Black
Cast: Mark Wahlberg and Lakeith Stanfield
Release: Oct 1st
Republic Pictures’ Trust
Cast: Sophie Turner (GOT)
Release: Aug 22nd
ITV’s The Hack
Cast: David Tennant, Robert Carlyle, Toby Jones
Netflix’s Jay Kelly
Dir: Noah Baumbach
Cast: George Clooney, Adam Sandler
Release: Nov 14
FESTIVALS
Locarno trailers:
God Will Not Help You (Official Selection):
Synopsis:
A Chilean woman named Teresa arrives at a remote Croatian shepherding community, saying she's their emigrant brother's widow.
Trailer: fire and demons abound! New Europe Film Sales (A24’s Lamb) is the sales rep.
Fantasy (First features section):
Synopsis:
Best friend tomboys who live in Slovenia have their world turns upside down when they meet Fantasy, a transgender woman.
Greg Bekkers’ (producer of the currently unreleased Ava starring Michael Madsen) Apollo Management Int’l is launching a sales arm. They’ve picked up 4 films, including international rights for Little Brother (2023) co-starring J.K. Simmons.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Alison Brie’s next scream queen move will be behind the lens.
Coming off the opening weekend of body horror Together, starring Brie and her husband Dave Franco, the GLOW actress is set to make her directorial debut with a “fun” and “female-forward” new horror film.
Brie, in addition to directing, also co-wrote the script, her second feature-length script after the eerily unpredictable Jeff Baena Sundance drama Horse Girl (2020, trailer).
Brie has perfected a brand of characters that thrive when they’re driven to insanity (Community clip), so this directorial debut seems to be a natural progression for the rising multi-hyphenated filmmaker.
Two-time short doc Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot (dir: The Last Repair Shop, A Concerto Is a Conversation) is making a feature doc, The Eyes of Ghana.
The film centers on Chris Hesse, the documentarian who filmed the rise and fall of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah.
We’re into whatever Proudfoot is working on. His The Last Repair Shop (2024, Full short) tracks the last instrument repair shop for school kids in LA. It mixes emotionally broken people with physically broken instruments into a cinematic symphony that is intimate and sweeping.
The Obamas’ Higher Ground EPs.
Tidbit:
Playboy's first female photographer, Bunny Yeager, gets a doc, Naked Ambition. Music Box Films distributes. It’s a fascinating story. Trailer. In theaters Sept 12th.
Hayley Gray’s award-winning short film Send The Rain is being made into a drama feature with Letterkenny’s Dylan Playfair and Erika Prevost (CBC’s Saint-Pierre) leading. Gray is writing and directing the family drama, which is currently shooting in rural British Columbia.
From Ferraris to Spaceships. Space 11, the company from Andrea Iervolino (prod: Ferrari) and Bert Ulrich (former NASA Entertainment Liaison) are launching their first film, I See You. It’s a love story, and they aim to shoot 85% in space.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
King & Conqueror, a historical epic starring James Norton (Happy Valley) as Harold of Wessex and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones) as William of Normandy, will stream on Prime Video in the U.S. and HBO Max across multiple international territories.
The eight-part series explores the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings. Airing on BBC August 24th.
Trailer here.
Acclaimed Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong is making his feature return with Netflix’s Possible Love (working title), a relationship drama following two couples who live vastly different lives.
Chang-dong’s Cannes psychological thriller Burning (2018, trailer), a Haruki Murakami adaptation, is one of the most well-received Korean films of the 21st century.
For his newest film, he is reunited with his Burning co-writer, Oh Jung-mi, with Possible Love currently in production.
Prime Video’s Embassy series starring JK Simmons is among the projects granted over $13M in production support by the German film industry.
This past month, we reported on Germany’s major plans to increase funding for production incentive programmes all throughout Europe. From Turbine Studios, the six-part political drama will begin filming on location in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) beginning this September.
Tidbits:
Chatha Pacha: The Ring of Rowdies, a Malayalam-language action drama set in the world of WWE-style wrestling, has secured international distribution in over 100 countries via Reel World Entertainment and The Plot Pictures. This is the group that distributed the absolutely wild epic RRR and gave it a global audience.
Mike van Diem (Oscar-winning director of 1997’s Character, trailer) has a new film, Our Girls. Synopsis: A serene getaway in the Austrian Alps descends into chaos when the once-solid bond between two longtime couples starts to fracture. LevelK (Sebastian) has just boarded as the sales rep as the film enters post.
ON THIS DAY
1953. From Here to Eternity is released.
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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